Today's networked business environment requires systems which are adaptive and easy to integrate. Event-based systems have been developed and used to control business processes with loosely coupled systems. One of the most promising concepts for gaining insight into business processes in order to support closed loop decision-making on an operative level is Complex Event Processing. CEP includes a set of technologies to process large amounts of events, utilizing them to monitor, steer and optimize the business processes with minimal latency. Typical application areas of CEP require fast decision cycles based on a large number of observable business events which can be used to discover exceptional situations or business opportunities. Typically, these are areas like financial market analysis, trading, security, fraud detection, logistics like tracking shipments, compliance checks, and customer relationship management.
The success of event-driven business solutions depends on an ongoing learning process. It is an iterative cycle including the analysis and interpretation of past processing results and the conversion of these results into the event-processing logic. Analysis tools are required which are tailored to the characteristics of event data to answer questions like: Where did irregularities occur in my business? Did processes change over time? Upon which data were past, automated decisions made? Did errors occur in the automated decision process? What happened at a certain point in time at a certain location and who was involved? To answer these questions, the business analyst has to be equipped with extensive retrieval tools to extract required data sets.